1. Field of the Invention
This invention relates to a process where an operator may select electronic document defect repair (DDR) templates to mask document substrate defects such as pre-drilled holes, dog ears, staple holes, and the like, when conducting system reprographic operations. Such templates comprise one or more opaque elements electronically positioned with respect to the input document image which the system control programs allow to be recalled. Additionally, the operator may save and recall both predefined and operator defined electronic DDR templates, including the size and position of all elements of the templates.
2. Description of Related Art
Currently available system reprographic products, such as the DocuTech electronic reprographic system, permit operators to electronically cover rectangular areas of digitized page images with an opaque mask. One or more masks can be applied to one or more pages of a job, but masks can only be defined once the page or pages have been scanned by the reprographic system. Masks can also be removed, i.e., removing a mask restores the original appearance of the image page.
Known prior art electronic reprographic systems, also support "windowing" during job programming. The window, or crop, feature permits the operator to specify a single rectangular area on a page image, or range of images, for deletion. Windows cannot be removed, however, because the image in the window area is not saved elsewhere in the system, i.e., the image data in the window is deleted.
An operator may also use the window, or crop, feature to repair document defects. However, since this feature provides only single, rectangular shapes to mask the defects, it has inherently limited selection. Additionally, using the crop feature to repair a document results in loss of the substrate image along an entire edge of the document.
Finally, another prior art mask feature does support the application of more than one mask, thereby providing improved selectivity over window or crop, however, the inability to save the masks can make the process of document defect repair using discrete masks extremely time consuming.
Typically then, reprographic products capable of accurate image reproduction reproduce all substrate defects (e.g., staple holes, tears and dog ears) present on the input document. Therefore, system reprographic operators need an efficient method of masking out repeatable document substrate defects and other repeatably positioned images on groups of documents.